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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23181850">Dance with the Dead</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bhelryss/pseuds/Bhelryss'>Bhelryss</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>AU: Zombies [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Zombies, magvel man disease, thank you artists octo-l95 and dt75artblog for bringing me to life, the rating is for zombies and also orson's implied necrophilia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 16:07:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,708</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23181850</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bhelryss/pseuds/Bhelryss</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Monica wakes from her sleep, and Orson weeps in her arms.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Marica | Marisa/Orson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>AU: Zombies [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1049063</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Dance with the Dead</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>thanks again to tumblr user octo-l95 for:</p><p>https://octo-l95.tumblr.com/post/611877706359046144</p><p>and tumblr user dt75artblog for:</p><p>https://dt75artblog.tumblr.com/post/611807704263114752/wow-intsys-is-getting-pretty-wild-with-these-new</p><p>these were inspiring</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div>
<p></p></div><p>
  <span>Monica wakes from her sleep, and Orson weeps in her arms. Tears spill from his eyes and disappear into the fine silk of her new dress, taken from the late queen’s closet. The dresses had been pressed and stored with care for Princess Eirika to inherit, but the princess had fled, and Monica would be his lady. The land had a new governor, after all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’s always wanted to present her with finery, give her the best of everything. This is his opportunity.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So she wakes up. He cries, and they’re happy tears. Happy tears, mostly, and some of the sad ones he’d not quite shed out. They’re left on their own, a castle to roam and a country to manage. This is his reward, the touch of her hand, the smell of her hair. Perfumed, and styled, cleaned carefully before she’d been resurrected. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wakes up as beautiful as she’d ever been. He kisses her hand, her arm, her shoulder, her mouth. He leans in, nipping at her lips, eager. Monica breathes heavily against his face, labored, pained?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Dove?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Darling,” she rasps, hands spasming against the bedsheets. She’s not ready, she’s only just awakened. Foolish Darling, always too eager. She’d say that if she weren’t still so heavy with the remnants of her sleep. He can wait. She’s worth the wait. She always has been.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The first day she leaves that bed, clumsy and stumbling, he picks her up and whirls around. And laughs, and it’s near rusty. Has it really been so long, since he last laughed? It feels like it’s been years.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Of course, it has. Monica has always been the light of his life, the meaning of everything. She’s not been dead- no, she’s not been </span>
  <em>
    <span>sleeping</span>
  </em>
  <span> very long, just as Prince Lyon promised. All of this, and she’s back, so quickly it’s like she’d never gone away. “Dove, my dove.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’ll always remember though. That week where she was gone. Really gone, sleeping and far away from him. Magic kept her from drifting too far away for the blessing, and then that blessing brought her back. Orson is well and truly a man restored. A man who is </span>
  <em>
    <span>alive</span>
  </em>
  <span> again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A kiss to her brow, her lips, and he goes to his duties. He would stay with her forever, but his duties do not wait.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Orson crashes through the door with an ache in his chest. Heart tied to Monica, he lets it usher him along with longing and glee until he’s before her again. On his knees, she lets him take her hand and press a long kiss to her palm. It’s soft, as soft as he remembered. His beautiful dove, the only song in his heart.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Finally, he is home.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Back when they were simple people, a knight and his wife, sometimes they would dance until Orson’s feet begged mercy. Standing, fighting, walking, riding, he had always tired sooner than her. “You’ll dance with me again,” he murmurs against her hair. It still smells of her perfume, but the feeling of it against his cheek is different than it should be. “You’ll dance with me now, won’t you, Dove?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She says nothing, but she moves when he does. Her hands aren’t quite warm in his, but she steps when he leads and whispers his name. “Darling,” the name she always called him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do you remember, when the men laughed at how you called me? Oh, they were just jealous of you. You were so perfect...you are so perfect, my dove. Just like you used to be.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He spins them around in a slow circle, and dips her at the end, just like they used to. She should giggle, and kiss him, but she’s tired. She speaks so little and lays so still in the mornings. “You used to be a morning person, Monica, are you truly so changed?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A bitter thought. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>No, she’s the same as she was. Things are still just too different. When he makes things normal again she’ll return to him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Monica’s head lolls backward like she can’t support it anymore. She’s so tired, his beautiful wife is so tired. He’ll let her sleep, and in the morning he can think about trying again. He’s just so eager for her touch, is all. He longs for the way she looks when she gasps into his mouth, yearns to see again how alive she truly is.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Until she’s ready again, he’ll have his dreams. And he’ll have these dances.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Two days after waking up, four dances in, when Orson brings Monica her meal she eats it. She eats like a little bird, the way she had during her sickness. He hovers anxiously trying to coax her into eating more, but she turns her face away and mutters his name. Chastised, Orson takes the food away, kisses her softly, and promises to come home soon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her appetite increases over time, though she gets ever thinner. He brings her more food, and more food, and starts cutting his working hours shorter. She needs him. He has to fix this, he’ll fix this. Somehow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>While she’s eating, ripping the breast out of a seared duck with only her teeth, grease smearing across her cheeks and the reddened juice dripping off her chin, Orson threads a pink ribbon into her hair. He’s braiding it the way she loves it, a little crown that curves around her head, and he’s watching her eat.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So hungry, my dove,” he comments, reaching around to wipe some of the mess from her cheekbone. He’s sure to be gentle because she looks so fragile now, with her shoulders bonier than ever. “Where do you put it,” he wonders, curling a lock of her hair around his finger, “why do you wear so thin?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Monica growls a little at him and shakes her head to dislodge his touch. She hates to be bothered, while she’s eating. He takes his hint and goes back to arranging her hair. Just how she’s always loved it, the way that makes her the prettiest woman ever to walk this earth. He gets distracted though, by counting the ribs he can feel through her dress. From her hips to her neck, it’s like he can feel every bone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But she’s eating, and she’s moving, and she’s dancing. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They dance still, every morning and every night. He dips her, and she bends backward farther and farther than she ever has before as though she can hardly try to right herself. Only, it would be silly, to think that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Wouldn’t it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sometimes, he wakes and finds her missing. He finds her in the kitchen most times, tearing bread and leftovers from earlier meals apart and shoving them past her teeth like they could save her, though sometimes she’s just standing in a corner. He hates it when she does that. It’s like spotting a corps- it’s like a nightmare.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He much prefers it when he wakes right next to her. It’s everything he’s ever wanted, and every morning it fills him with joy. Even when her fingers become like fleshless bones, when he struggles to put enough food on the table for her to gnaw on, even when her lips dry out her hair grows stiff. Her skin loses color, her hair loses its thickness, and when they dance he is forced to move her too. She’s so tired, and all she ever wants to do is eat. Sometimes he clenches his jaw and watches her singleminded appetite with something bitter just behind his tongue. When will Orson get to be eager again, get to touch her so gently, so intimately? When will his wife let him act like a husband?!</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Except, she’s here, she’s right here. This is what he wanted.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This is what he wanted.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>None of her new dresses fit, any longer. Even alterations can’t match the way she has withered away to nothing but bones and skin and teeth, to make them fit would be to trash the opulent gown for one </span>
  <em>
    <span>passably</span>
  </em>
  <span> cobbled together from the same material. Her old dresses don’t fit either, but he pulls them from storage anyway. These at least he doesn’t feel guilty about tearing apart to make something new.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There’s no food left in the castle, that Monica hasn’t already eaten. One evening he’d come to dance her to dinner, and had found her eating the last pig kept in the castle’s kitchen farm. The blood had gotten under her nails, like talons, and had soaked ankle-deep into the hem of her dress. When she turned her head, he’d been struck by how sunken in her eyes had seemed. She had been hunched over like a startled creature, less like a woman and his wife and more like some...no, he won’t say it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Orson needs to find more food.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He taxes the city surrounding the castle, payable in coin or in feast foods. Only the best for her, only the most delicious things for Monica. He never wants to see her eating the guts out of a pig again. She deserves more than that. She needs more than that. He needs her, he needs her to finally feel full. He needs his </span>
  <em>
    <span>wife</span>
  </em>
  <span> back, the way she used to be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>All the gods and demons of lore, if they’re out there, does he miss his wife, the way she used to be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Please give her back,” he whispers into Monica’s hair. He still washes and perfumes it, even though Monica twitches and vocalizes and gnashes her teeth hungrily, but it still smells...different. Not the same. He can’t say why, he doesn’t know. It’s unsettling, to hold his wife in his arms but know she’s gone strange. She’s not the same. He doesn’t know this Monica, and when they dance it’s like he dances alone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’s so alone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’s right here, though. She’s right here, and isn’t that what he wanted above </span>
  <em>
    <span>everything</span>
  </em>
  <span> else?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s what he sacrificed everything for. He’d do anything for her. Anything to keep her. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Including killing his prince, when the boy steps foot into what used to be his home. He’ll do that for her. To keep her safe. To keep her fed. So that they can dance.</span>
</p>
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